One way to enter pinyin with accent marks on a mac
Sometimes, like when you run out of pages in your notebook and pull out your laptop to take notes in Mandarin class, you just need to enter some pinyin (transliterated Chinese) with accent marks. With additional software, such as Wenlin, or the PC-only NJStar, this is easy. But in a pinch you can also enter pinyin with accent marks on a mac with without installing any additional software.
First, you must activate the U.S. Extended keyboard, then with that keyboard selected in your input menu, you can key in one of 4 accent mark key combinations followed by the letter that gets the mark. The accent mark key combinations for pinyin tones 1 through 4 are (in order):
- option-a
- option-e
- option-b
- option-`
It’s not as easy as those dedicated Chinese applications I mention above, in which you can enter input tone markers by number, but at least it makes it possible to type pinyin in any unicode aware application.
Now I can write wonderful sentences like “wŏ bù xiăng hē dōngxi” until I plotz from happiness.
January 9th, 2006 at 11:44 pm
Great ! With my french keyboard, it was impossible to get these accents !
The only way I founded is to use the Special Caracters Window…
So you can imagine how long it could be…
Thanks a lot for giving me the answer to my problem with the pinyin accents.
I’m a happy man !
April 7th, 2006 at 6:12 pm
Hĕn hăo! That worked out nice. Thanks a lot!
July 25th, 2006 at 5:14 am
Thank you. Much more useful than NJStar for PC. :-)
March 29th, 2010 at 12:25 am
Hey, that’s really cool!
But the third tone mark is option-v, not option-b! ;)
March 31st, 2010 at 9:15 pm
I just ran a little test:
option-v,a = ǎ
option-b,a = ă
It’s hard to tell when the letters are tiny, but when I set a larger font size, I can see that option-b puts a smooth u-shaped curve above the vowel, and option-v puts a v-shaped curve above the vowel. The little u mark makes more sense to me than a little v mark, as the tone has a curve to it in my mind and doesn’t just go down and then sharply up. But it looks like the Wikipedia article on Pinyin uses the ‘v’-shaped mark above the letter to denote the third tone. Who am I to rewrite Pinyin. Option-v it is.